Parenting Talk

This is an article written by Scott Neigh for a zine on activist parenting produced by Kathryn Neigh.

Most things that you hear or read about parenting, from either so-called
experts or other parents, tend to focus on "you should" or "I/we do." It
might be Aunt Minnie telling you that three thick blankets is just not enough
to keep your newborn warm, or a co-worker confiding that she is not taking
her son into any public places until he's at least one year old in order to
avoid germs. It might be a La Leche League comrade expounding her "parenting
philosophy" and asking about yours. It might be your pediatrician or a
parenting how-to book pushing some kind of dietary supplement. It might be
the customary form of smalltalk among newly acquainted parents -- cloth
versus disposable, techniques to encourage night-long sleep, breast or
bottle.

The tone of these interactions -- of this "parenting talk" -- can vary a lot.
It can resemble orders issued from the vantage of some kind of greater
authority, perhaps that assumed by elder relatives or paid experts such as
doctors. It might be moralistic, with the subtle or not-so-subtle
implication that you are a Bad Parent, and therefore a Bad Person, if
your conduct does not meet whatever standard has been decreed. Or it
often is very friendly and warm and helpful and full of goodwill and
respect for difference.

Despite all of this diversity, most parenting talk has some common underlying
assumptions that structure it. Perhaps the most important way in which
parenting talk is structured is how thoroughly individualistic it tends
to be. By the huge emphasis on choice of action and behaviour -- whether
conservative and moralistic or liberal and "let's all be friends," or
both -- it is produced by and constantly reinforces the messaging in our
culture that tells us that the individual choices of parents are of exclusive
importance in the raising of children.

The truth is more complicated than that. Rather than treating parenting
as complete and self-contained, something that a parent can do and then
be judged on, we need to see parenting as an effort of constant negotiation
with social forces, as something that is perpetually incomplete, as a
single intervention in an ever-changing sea of impacts on children.

For one thing, treating parenting as an individualistic exercise in
consumer-like choice in how we talk, rather than as a constant give and
take with the social, normalizes the experiences of parents who have more
opportunity to make significant decisions -- in other words, it treats
circumstances of privilege as normal and invisible, and tends to lead to
the conclusion that parents who lack privilege are somehow lacking or
even "bad," thereby reinforcing marginalization.

For example, it may be easy to pretend that how one's toddler is cared
for is purely an expression of individualistic values when you are in a
two-parent family where the father is an investment banker. In reality,
how childcare happens for you is a product of both complicated decisions
at the individual level and social factors like the availability of cheap
daycare, the number of adults in the household, the nature and expense of
local transportation networks, the ability of the adult(s) in the household
to access jobs and the barriers they might face because of racism or
sexism in the labour market, and lots of other things.

Any honest and complete answer to the question, "How are your children
being raised?" cannot be all about you. Insisting on parenting talk that
reflects this through and through helps parents disrupt the delusions
and blindness about the world that often accompany privilege and, more
importantly, is grounded from the start in and reaffirms the realities
that most parents have to face.

Allowing ourselves to see the way that the social shapes parenting allows
us in turn to see how affecting the social is a valid and important part
of parenting. Any engaged parent that seeks ways to live labels like
"progressive" or "radical" or "activist" has to include as an integral
part of their parenting talk an acknowledgment of collective efforts to
shape the social context. This includes attempts to nudge the large scale
social context, whether in a group focused around a parental identity like
"Mamas For Peace" or more general groups that are concerned about the issues
which shape our children's social environment.

It also includes ways of shaping collective context that are closer to
home: nonmainstream ways of structuring life that aren't just about
choices within the standard nuclear family but are collective enterprises
that transform it and/or go beyond it. Examples include giving serious
consideration (or at least space in our routine parenting talk) to
co-operative babysitting or alternative living arrangements, from
co-housing to communes. Countless other possibilities await only
our imagination and action. (One of the most creative links I've seen
between parenting and the social has been made by friends who home school
their three daughters, and as part of that effort they all produce a weekly
radio show, Radio Free School,
archived at www.radio4all.net and
broadcast by several stations.)

There is no obvious script to live this kind of parenting, nor should
there be, but it is hard to even wrap our heads around the possibilities
when we are immersed in a culture that pushes messages that everything,
including parenting, should be privatized and focused on money-mediated
consumption. Even many people for whom the social is a regular subject
of thought, talk, and action dissociate that from how they think, talk,
and act about parenting, and have trouble thinking outside of individualistic
ways to incorporate their politics. Owning Heather Has Two Mommies,
going to your city's Aboriginal Day celebrations, and modelling
nonauthoritarian relationships are all important, but they are not enough.
The first step in going beyond that and creating truly radical parenting
is pushing ourselves to imagine what it might look like, and changing our
parenting talk to reflect it.